With another nod to my genealogy induced ADD, I'll bring you a double mystery.

One can probably be solved, and the other, most likely not.I got a contact last week from a cousin several times removed who is researching our Herringtons. He and I share a great-grandfather, Jasper Monroe Herrington, but we are descended from different wives.

True to form after that series of emails, I leapt away from research on my elusive Duncans, and jumped right back on our Herringtons. (My Duncans, however, are brick wall lightweights when compared to my great-great grandmother Mary C Dunn.)I think my cousin and I are the only ones researching our Herringtons (the ones in Arkansas who are descended from Madison Monroe Herrington) in a serious way, because there are *major* omissions and inaccuracies in a whole bunch of Ancestry family trees on them.

Like when and where did John Wesley S Herrington (son of Madison Monroe and Julia Ann Holt) die? A bunch of folks say in April 1967 in Camden, Benton Co., TN.

But that SSDI record does not convince me. Because I think John W S Herrington died in Hot Spring Co., AR, sometime between the 1910 census and the remarriage of his widow, Margaret Emaline "Maggie" Kendrick on 25 Apr 1912.

I think there is a grave, badly maintained, or not even marked, somewhere in Hot Spring County for him.

That mystery can probably be solved.

But then, there's Maggie.John W S Herrington and Maggie Kendrick married on 21 May 1899 in Hot Spring County. He was 20 years old and she was 16. She was the daughter of James J Kendrick and Elizabeth Stanley.

By the 1910 census - taken in Hot Spring County - they had four children. That census record showed that mercifully, all the children born to Maggie Kendrick were still alive. Their youngest daughter, Opal Mae, was four months old at the time of the census.

Mrs. Maggie Herrington married Sandford Ramey Bashaw on 25 Apr 1912 in Hot Spring County. In the 1920 census in Hot Spring County, Opal Mae's surname - spelled Herington on the form - was crossed out and she had become a Bashaw.

She had four younger siblings in that census, including her four month old half-brother, Oscar Kendrick Bashaw.

I moved on to 1930 - and found Sandford Bashaw with three of his four children in Holtville, Imperial Co., CA, working on a fruit farm.

And no Maggie in sight.

The form said Sandford was married, but there was no wife in his home at the time of the census.

And I couldn't find Maggie Bashaw that year to save my life. So I went back to marriage records.

Mrs. Maggie Bashaw married James W Bledsoe on Christmas Eve in 1923, in Saline County, AR. Her youngest child, Oscar, was four years old.

At the 1930 census, Oscar was 10 and living with his dad in California. His mother was living in Benton, AR, making crates at a factory.

I wondered how Maggie bore it - being separated from all of her children. Two of her first four children - James Monroe and Opal Mae Herrington, lived to be adults. I can't find any death information about the middle Herrington children, Eliot and Gillis, who were born in 1904 and 1907, respectively.

All four of Maggie's children by Sandford Bashaw died in California between 1962 and 1992. Their Social Security numbers were issued to them by the State of California, before 1951. That sounds to me as if there was a tear in the family fabric that went beyond the divorce between Maggie and Sandford Bashaw.

Maggie Kendrick Herrington Bashaw Bledsoe died on 19 May 1966, and is buried with her final husband in Old Rosemont Cemetery in Benton, Saline Co., AR.